computer nerds

him ^ | 9-1-07

[LouAvul]

Another freeper has the following question:

Alot of the boards these days (I’m talkin the dual core 2+ GHZ stuff) come designed for the newer Serial ATA hard drive interface.

I have 200+ gig of 7200 RPM regular old enhanced ATA drives which I am not gonna junk.

Does any of the newer stuff come with BOTH SATA and E-ATA ports?

[LouAvul]

bump to ya

[djf]

Thnx. I figured someone might pick it up on the other thread, guess it blew by them all.

[Terpfen]

E-ATA

You mean E-IDE, right?

I'm sure there are still motherboards that support both standards, but E-IDE is a dying format. Most hard drive manufacturers are going to cease making the drives early next year.

[djf]

I posted the question to a thread Lou had started.

Yes, I mean E IDE. The one with the whatizit 80 wire cable. I have a couple almost brand new Caviars with tons of data that I would like to continue using.

So my question is more about boards than drives.

[Terpfen]

Well, like I said, there should be a few motherboards that still support EIDE. Check newegg.com.

Just don’t count on support extending to infinity. The standard is going to be killed next year, which means motherboards will drop support soon.

If you’re hellbent on using the drives, you could always buy a dedicated remote storage box and slot the drives in there, or put them in an old computer and use that computer as network storage.

[Spruce]

I have not seen a board yet that does not have standard IDE interface. Not to mention there will always be expansion boards available.

[djf]

I actually have a RAID card that would support them but not at the speeds that a regular board interface would give me.

So I just guess we’ll all have to get new hardware and VISTA, eh?

I have enuff problems already!!

[Terpfen]

No, there’s no need for Vista in this particular situation. I answered your question—yes, there are motherboards that support EIDE, check newegg.com—but also trying to give you options to retain use of those hard drives you have for longer periods of time.

There’s no need to buy a new motherboard specifically for the EIDE drives when you can simply slot them in an old computer or a dedicated box and put them on your network, thus giving the hard drives lifespans that are independent of your other computers, which you can replace and upgrade at will.

Honestly, if I were you, I’d just put the drives in an old computer, add said computer to the home network wirelessly, then put the computer in the basement or a closet somewhere and ignore it. (IMO, using an old computer has an advantage over a dedicated storage box in that you can upgrade the wireless networking capabilities just by adding a wireless network card to the old computer.)

But it’s your money, your drives, and your choice.

[Billthedrill]

If your hot new board (jealousy alert!) doesn't support EIDE you can always get a couple of those cheap USB cases and turn them into external drives. Not all of those support EIDE either but a good number do. Yes, you'd be sacrificing throughput, but you wouldn't be sacrificing your hard drive investment.

Funny story - I purchased one of those cases so I could "salvage" the stack of hard drives I'd accumulated over the years. Biggest one turned out to be 2.6 GB. I have thumb drives bigger than that. (Sigh!)

[free_for_now]

You can probably get one of those external drive box thingies that turns an old drive into a USB drive. Might suit your needs. Here is one I just looked up on Newegg

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817605004

[djf]

LOL! Knowwhutyamean.

If the new “standard” (for the next six months or so) is Serial ATA, then you can expect to be able to pick up a couple terrabytes of brand new EIDE drives for a song.

Works for me.

Especially if they’re the laptop size.

[Terpfen]

If the new “standard” (for the next six months or so) is Serial ATA

The current standard is SATA2 now.

[ThePythonicCow]

Looks like others have already answered this, but yes, more or less all motherboards support PATA.

This is in part because the CDROM/DVD manufacturers have been slow to change from PATA to SATA, so at least one PATA channel is still needed, which is good for two drives (called master and slave). The CD/DVD disks simply don't need the higher speeds possible with SATA, and have been wed to the lower cost electronics needed for PATA.

We used to call the common desktop disk drive interface IDE. It uses a parallel cable, with 40 signal lines in a wide flat arrangement (plus sometimes another 40 ground lines, on the higher speed interconnects.) The actual standard was named ATA, but the IDE term (from a Western Digital interface) was more commonly used.

Then an entirely different cable and connector interface for ATA came along, called SATA (Serial ATA) with just a few signal lines (two pairs, one for each direction) and the data and address pushed through serially (not a separate wire anymore for each bit position, but rather one bit after another pushed down the balanced pair)

At that point, it became more common to call the parallal ATA interface (aka IDE interface) by the name PATA, for parallel ATA, to distinguish it from the newer SATA interface.

[ThePythonicCow]

with 40 signal lines

Correction - 40 lines altogether - for a combination of data, address, ground, power and other signaling.

[Company Man]

If not, PCI-based IDE adaptor cards are very inexpensive nowadays.

[rawcatslyentist]

NewEgg Rox!!!

I ordered 100 cdrs, and dvds and they were on my porch in 2 days!

Much more convientient that having to stand in line a WallyOfficeCircuit World!

[MarkL]

Yes, most motherboards have at least one ATA port, if for no other reason than for CD/DVD drives.

It’s not a problem installing XP on one of those systems. However, if you ever decide to install XP on SATA drives, do yourself a favor and be sure to hook up a legacy floppy disk drive (not a USB floppy) for the installation, in order to load the SATA drivers for the OS install.

Although you’re supposed to be able to use a USB floppy or flash drive, it’s been my experience that sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t.

BTW, does anyone know of a really good “How-To” on slipstreaming disk drivers into an XP or Server2003 install CD? There are loads of places to find how to do so for service packs, but I’ve yet to find one for adding disk and lan drivers. I’ve gotten close, but it seems that I never get the SIF file set up quite right, so the install bombs.

Mark

[Terpfen]

Concerning slipstreaming: have you tried n-lite?

[ThePythonicCow]

Keeping old PATA (IDE) drives around is seldom a good idea, for two reasons:

1. Cost - they aren't worth much. You can get a new drive for such low cost that it's not worth much investment to keep the old one running. For example, a newegg.com, the Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive is available for $64.99.
2. Reliability - unless you have good backups or are using the drive for something not worth any effort to recover if (when) the drive fails, you don't want to keep your data on cheap old drives. Good hard drive stats, such as Google's http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf, show that the failure rate of drives climbs steadily with the age of the drive. Move your data to new drives every two or three years, whether you need to or not.